Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan is exactly the sort of telegenic, mild-mannered spokesman the new Republican House needs as its leaders seek to reintroduce the party. He's known as one of the intellectuals of the GOP, and is respected by Democrats for his willingness to go deep into the weeds of budget policy -- even if he ends up far to the right of a place they consider wise. He's good looking, young and has the sort of only-in-Washington wonky charisma that tends to augur a bright political future.

So when Ryan delivers the Republican response to President Obama's State of the Union address on Tuesday night, it seems like nothing could go wrong.

Not so. For a variety of reasons, the contemporary televised State of the Union response almost never goes well for the person who delivers it. The best outcome is that the politician does him or herself no long-term harm.

What could go wrong for Ryan:

Awkward Optics. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal (R), like Ryan, was considered one of his party's rising stars -- telegenic, innovative, policy-oriented -- when he gave the rebuttal in 2009. All it took was some Twitter chatter and the next thing he knew, he was Kenneth the Page from "30 Rock." Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius (D) went from a potential vice presidential pick to, uh, someone eventually tapped to run the Department of Health and Human Services after delivering a flat rebuttal in 2008 that demonstrated that what matters in Kansas doesn't necessarily translate well on the national stage. And does anyone recall anything about Democratic Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine's 2006 response except that thing his left eyebrow kept doing?

After the State of the Union, reporters are antsy and tired, and remaining television watchers are tired and possibly even bored. The response speech will be "available as prepared" and published online the moment it begins. That means that the actual televised response is watched mainly as theater -- and by a distracted audience, to boot.

Ryan's Clark Kent good looks and manner of presentation would seem likely to protect him from mockery, but you never know. All it takes is one disturbingly apt comparison or one physical twitch to set off a career-impeding narrative.

Bad Choice of Anecdotes. Jindal sought to attack wasteful spending by going after, among other things, the U.S. Geological Survey's $140 million volcano monitoring budget -- and people are still thwacking him for it. Volcano monitoring turned out to be important, as political opponents were quick to remind the next time one erupted. And the next time. And the next.

A Bad Setting. Last year, Gov. Bob McDonnell (R) gave his response from the Virginia House of Delegates, which looked like a Spinal Tap Tiny Stonehenge version of the U.S. House of Representatives. Kaine's Masterpiece Theatre-style setting, replete with fireplace, in the state's Executive Mansion contrasted poorly with the crowded majesty of the Capitol.

Like all other SOTU-responders, they were at a disadvantage from the start. No matter how good Ryan's speech is, the setting and context will inevitably make him look small -- or else, potentially, overly ambitious.

Bad Political Judgment. If Ryan focuses on his own deficit-cutting proposals, he could turn moderates and independents off, no matter how well-spoken he is. Ryan has proposed a voucher system for Medicare and private accounts for Social Security, and, while the GOP has heavily criticized the ballooning national debt, Americans are deeply opposed to cuts and changes to these two programs. In fact, Ryan's own budget proposals have been too conservative for other Republicans, with the House Republican Conference signing onto a less aggressive deficit-cutting plan than the one Ryan laid out last year.

Ryan is a policy polymath, but if he gets too specific in calling for entitlement cuts, he could paint himself and his party right into a corner.

Seeming Overly Partisan--or Not Partisan Enough. Ryan will have to be careful to strike the right tone, and to gauge how aggressive he needs to be in responding to Obama.

Obama will undoubtedly mention Arizona Rep. Gabrielle Giffords (D) in his address, and the president is likely to renew his call for civility in our political discussion. At the same time, fiscal issues have riled the passions of the GOP base these past two years, and tea partiers in particular will want to see Ryan come out swinging.

Then-Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) was criticized for coming across as weak in his 2005 rebuttal, and Democrat Sen. Jim Webb (another Virginian!) won praise for his robust, to-hell-with-handlers 2007 response. But tone is a hard thing to get right in what remains a highly partisan moment -- and with nearly 60 members of the House and Senate pledging to cross the aisle and sit alongside their political foes, the already tricky task will be that much trickier.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.